‘Soul Mates’

Anyone laboring under the stereotypical delusion that teenagers are uncommunicative would do well to stop by Kimberly Kirberger’s office. A suite just off a courtyard in the breeze-swept Pacific Palisades, it is a warren of rooms that do not look like anyone under the age of 35 has anything to do with them. The offices are tidy and bright, scented by flowers and aromatherapeutic candles, and were quiet on a recent weekday, save the Plasticine tap of computer keyboard and the occasional modulated conversation.

Yet these glimmering, sweet-smelling rooms roil with teenagers, with their slouching, backpack-toting forms, their indirect sideways smiles, their casually meaningful shrugs. For this office exists as a repository of teenage words--hopes, fears and dreams, some contained in the rows and rows of books on the shelves that line each room, but most revealed in the letters. Hundreds of letters, thousands of letters, hundreds of thousands of letters from teenagers have dropped through Kirberger’s mail slot over the last two years, thousands more e-mails have found her electronic address. Thank-you letters and pleas for help, stories of hope and anger, of lost friendship and unrequited love, of death and valor, typed and scrawled, in free form verse and essay form, from houses and schools and apartments and prisons and dorm rooms all around the world.

And every one of them is read, every one answered. By people who absolutely understand--other teens. Because Kimberly Kirberger loves teenagers, everything about them, and surrounds herself with as many as she can find.

In fact, they have become her oeuvre, her specialty, her career. Kirberger is coauthor of the wildly popular “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul” series, the new “Chicken Soup for the College Soul” and is sole author of the recently debuted “Teen Love Series.” Essentially anthologies of real-life stories, and a few poems, about--and often by--teens, the books cover a tremendously wide variety of experiences, from coping with crushes to dealing with addiction to surviving the death of a friend or sibling.

A Spinoff of Her Brother’s Project

It started with her brother, Jack Canfield, a personal growth professional who created, with Mark Victor Hansen, the first “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book in 1993.

“I was fascinated,” said Kirberger, 45, who was working as a jewelry designer at the time. “I asked if I could be a part of it. So I started reading the letters that began pouring in after the book came out. I was most drawn to the ones from teens. I just love teens,” she said. “I had a very happy teenage experience, and some people have accused me of never growing up.”

Which is a bit of an exaggeration--besides running the “Teen Soul” fiefdom, she is mother to 14-year-old Jesse and stepmom to 23-year-old Bodhi. And she certainly understands the anguish of loss and change; her jewelry business arose from her need to support her family from home when her first husband was stricken with cancer. He died when Jesse was small; Kirberger married Bodhi’s father, John Anderson, nine years ago.

“The letters from the teens seemed more desperate to me,” she said. “So I said to Jack, ‘Let’s do one just for teens.’ And he said sure but warned me that teens don’t read, and teens don’t buy books so I shouldn’t be disappointed when it didn’t have the same success as the other ‘Chicken Soup’ books. But I thought that if we just let the kids tell their stories, not use them to disguise advice, we would be successful. And I was right.”

She was right, to the tune of 7 million copies sold. And that was just the first one. The second volume sold a million copies in its first month and shot to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

While the first book contains some previously published material, the subsequent volumes are all original works, the majority of which are from teens, many of whom wrote to Kirberger after the publication of the first book. After a few months of trying to deal with the deluge herself, and then with a tiny staff of grown-ups, she decided she needed to hire some specialists.

“I approached teenagers in Starbucks, I contacted teachers, I asked friends and neighbors,” she said. “Pretty much the same way I went about getting submissions for the first book. I just asked.”

And soon she had put together IAM (Inspiration and Motivation) for Teens Inc., an organization dedicated to helping her favorite demographic group. Within the organization is the Teen Letter Project, through which anywhere from six to 15 paid teenage staff members read and answer the 800 letters and 500 e-mails Kirberger and IAM receive each week. Some of the letters are actually submissions for the next “Teen Soul,” due out in April. But every letter will be read and answered by a peer.

“My mission is to show who teens really are,” said Kirberger, “not some preconceived conception.”

The group huddled around the wooden table in one of the IAM offices inarguably consists of the real thing. There are the requisite exposed midriffs and bra straps, the occasional piercings, the Spandex and mile-high shoe soles. Of the five, four are young women, but the young man compensates by having royal blue hair. They are listening, and sometimes singing along, to Star 98.7 FM. They are talking about how happy they are that Felicity chose Ben and not Noel, because Noel never smiles and Ben is dreamy, although one young woman said she hates the TV show because “yeah, so this girl has a free ride to Harvard, a free apartment, a phat car and she gives it up to be on her own. Right.” They use words like “phat” and “gnarly.”

And “suicide.” And “pregnancy.” And “hotline.”

Rose Lannulte, 17; Dawn Geer, 16; Elliot Hallmark (“just like the card company”), 16; Rebecca Woolf (“just like Virginia”), 18; and Kelly Harrington, 21, are surrounded by drifts of letters. (Harrington usually devotes herself mostly to the e-mail). Each letter has a light blue half-cover-sheet on which the teens will mark whether it is a no or maybe for possible inclusion in Vol. 3--Kirberger, Canfield and other staff read all of the “maybes” and make the final selections. The teens also decide what type of response the letter should receive. There are four possible form letter responses: a thank you for a thank you, congratulations on having survived a traumatic experience, a compliment on the writing talent of the author (“some of our submissions are actually too good for us,” Kirberger said) and, for those obviously in need of help, a commendation on the bravery of the author to share her or his pain as well as the suggestion she or he talk to someone else. This last also includes appropriate hotline numbers, which, said Kirberger, is all they are legally allowed to do.

All of these types of letters, as well as any others that seem to the staff odd or scary, go directly to Kirberger. And if a letter particularly touches a staff member, she or he will set it aside for a more personal response.

Peers Find a Mix of Joy and Sadness

Three or four days a week, for three to five hours a day, the staff reads and responds, logs and files, and absorbs the emotional outpourings, joyful and despairing, of their peers.

“It can get depressing,” said Rose, “especially if you have a lot of suicidal letters. But then you get these really great stories, and they make you feel really high. So it’s a mix.”

“It’s a much more interesting job than any other I could have gotten,” Elliot said. “I mean, I was applying at Blockbuster, and when the manager wasn’t looking, the staff was saying, ‘Don’t work here, it’s hell.’ ”

“I was a busgirl,” Dawn said. “This way I can help other teens, which makes me feel good.”

The volume of the letters varies, they say, depending on the time of year--the beginning of the school year’s the slowest--and what’s going on. In recent months, they’ve received more than 100 letters about the Columbine shootings, from there and all over the country.

Reading the letters day after day has given the staff a greater appreciation of some of the problems teens endure and overcome, as well as resonating in their own lives.

“I had no idea there were so many people going through the same things,” Rose said. “Eating disorders, drugs, divorce. And I’ve had a couple of letters that really made me sit up and look at my own life.”

“I was really shocked when I read about so many problems,” Harrington said. “But when you think about it, it’s all part of growing up. It’s no more or less than kids have always gone through.”

Everyone at the table rejects the idea that teens today are more troubled, pressured or likely to explode. In fact, they reject the very concept of teens today.

“Every teen is different,” said Rose. “If you want to know what’s going on with the teens, hang with the teens. There’s too much generalization.”

“This place is different,” Dawn said. “This place gives more respect to teenagers, takes them seriously. Which is why the books are so popular.”

Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.